A high school prom attendee moved audiences to tears when she revealed a months-long secret about her father's fate and the reason his shoes were muddy.
“I have one more thing to say, I want to see if I can get through this.”
On Thursday at Early College High School in Farmers Branch, Texas, north of Dallas, 18-year-old Alem Hadzic joined his classmates in celebrating their collective milestone. He also shared the very personal experience of his father's death the previous day and his burial that same morning.
After reviewing his prepared remarks, the valedictorian announced to the crowd, “I have one more thing to say, I want to see if I can get through this.”
“My father passed away yesterday, May 15, 2024,” Hadzic explained to gasps from the audience, “and I attended his funeral today right before I graduated.”
“That's why my shoes are muddy. That's why my arms are shaking because I had to take him to his grave and bury him”, continued the emotional witness.
According to a statement from the Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School District, “Hadzic chose to keep this a secret from his peers, he didn't want anyone to treat him differently because of it.”
In an interview with Fox 4, the young man explained that the day his father, Miralem Hadzic, succumbed to pancreatic cancer that had been diagnosed five months earlier, he went to school, wrote his speech and only he told his closest friends what he was going through.
“I was scared because I really didn't know. I went to my father's funeral right before … I couldn't talk about what I wrote because a lot more had happened since then, right? Hadzic explained. “And so, I go on stage, I started reading the script, and when I got to my father's part, I couldn't read it anymore. I had to speak from my experience, and I had to speak from the heart.”
“I went up there. I gave my speech. I looked out into the audience and I didn't expect to see so many people crying,” she told Fox 4's Good Day.
During his speech, the winner praised his father, an immigrant from Bosnia, saying, “I can't stand here and pretend I want to make this speech right now. But I can't throw away something that he worked so hard to get. And that's why I'm going to college and I'm going to spend every hour of every day working as hard as I can to achieve all my goals.”
“Because that's what he wanted and I'm going to do it for him,” Hadzic added of his goals to pursue a degree in chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.
When asked about the welcome from the attendees, the young man detailed an outpouring of kindness and support, even from people he had never met before: “I didn't know any of them, but they approached me. They made me feel better. They wanted to take pictures with me. They told me how strong I was and it made me feel so much better. It made me feel so good on such a dark day. It was really what I needed.”
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